1861: The Civil War Awakening [NOOK Book]

Overview

As the United States marks the 150th anniversary of our defining national drama, 1861 presents a gripping and original account of how the Civil War began.

1861 is an epic of courage and heroism beyond the battlefields. Early in that fateful year, a second American revolution unfolded, inspiring a new generation to reject their parents’ faith in compromise and appeasement, to...

More About
This Book

Overview

As the United States marks the 150th anniversary of our defining national drama, 1861 presents a gripping and original account of how the Civil War began.

1861 is an epic of courage and heroism beyond the battlefields. Early in that fateful year, a second American revolution unfolded, inspiring a new generation to reject their parents’ faith in compromise and appeasement, to do the unthinkable in the name of an ideal. It set Abraham Lincoln on the path to greatness and millions of slaves on the road to freedom.

The book introduces us to a heretofore little-known cast of Civil War heroes—among them an acrobatic militia colonel, an explorer’s wife, an idealistic band of German immigrants, a regiment of New York City firemen, a community of Virginia slaves, and a young college professor who would one day become president. Adam Goodheart takes us from the corridors of the White House to the slums of Manhattan, from the mouth of the Chesapeake to the deserts of Nevada, from Boston Common to Alcatraz Island, vividly evoking the Union at this moment of ultimate crisis and decision.

Editorial Reviews

Debby Applegate

Many good studies about the [Civil War] will be published, but few will be as exhilarating as 1861: The Civil War Awakening. Like many of the best works of history, 1861 creates the uncanny illusion that the reader has stepped into a time machine…Goodheart's version is at once more panoramic and more intimate than most standard accounts, and more inspiring. This is fundamentally a history of hearts and minds, rather than of legislative bills and battles.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Goodheart, a historian and journalist who will be writing a column on the Civil War for the New York Times online, makes sophisticated use of a broad spectrum of sources for an evocative reinterpretation of the Civil War's beginnings. Wanting to retrieve the war from recent critics who dismiss the importance of slavery in the Union's aims, he reframes the war as "not just a Southern rebellion but a nationwide revolution" to free the country of slavery and paralyzing attempts to compromise over it. The revolution began long before the war's first shots were fired. But it worked on the minds and hearts of average whites and blacks, slaves and free men. By 1861 it had attained an irresistible momentum. Goodheart shifts focus away from the power centers of Washington and Charleston to look at the actions and reactions of citizens from Boston to New York City, from Hampton Roads, Va., to St. Louis, Mo., and San Francisco, emphasizing the cultural, rather than military, clash between those wanting the country to move forward and those clinging to the old ways. War would be waged for four bitter years, with enduring seriousness, intensity, and great heroism, Goodheart emphasizes. 15 illus. (Apr.)

From the Publisher

Praise for Adam Goodheart’s 1861

“Exhilarating.... At once more panoramic and more intimate than most standard accounts, and more inspiring.... Goodheart turns the lens away from the usual stars of the story [and] explores the more obscure corners of antebellum America, introducing fascinating figures who loomed large at the time but have now been mostly forgotten.... [With] a journalist’s eye for telling detail with the rigorous research of a good historian...Goodheart gives his far-flung journey narrative tension and suspense.... 1861 creates the uncanny illusion that the reader has stepped into a time machine.... Irresistible.”
—Debby Applegate, New York Times Book Review (cover)

“It’s as if Picasso and Braque put together an account of the War Between the States. Goodheart is, for want of a better term, a cubist; he takes what is known, breaks it down to its elemental parts and rearranges it, giving us a different view entirely of something we thought we understood entirely.... Hardly a page of this book lacks an insight of importance or a fact that beguiles the reader.... Goodheart shows us that even at 150 years’ distance there are new voices, and new stories, to be heard about the Civil War, and that together they can have real meaning.... Goodheart’s new history makes a huge contribution to changing how that past looked and, by doing so, explaining it.”
—David M. Shribman, Boston Globe (cover of the book review)

“1861 is the best book I have ever read on the start of the Civil War. Sumter, secession, and Lincoln appear in a wonderfully fresh and illuminating light, supported by a cast of extraordinary players that few Americans know about. Penetrating, eloquent, and deeply moving, this is a classic introduction to the nation’s greatest conflict.”
—Tony Horwitz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Confederates in the Attic

“Combining a master historian’s sure command of original sources and a novelist’s deft touch with character and narrative, Adam Goodheart has produced the young century’s liveliest book about how a generation of remarkable and ordinary Americans alike variously provoked, resisted, and endured the dissolution of their country and the tragic march toward civil war. Major and minor characters, political movements, and whole towns and villages come alive under Goodheart’s expert scrutiny. The result is that rarest of history books: a work of remarkable original scholarship crafted into an irresistible read.”
—Harold Holzer, chairman of The Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and author of Lincoln President-Elect

“Adam Goodheart brings to this book a rare combination of talent: passion and precision as a historian, grace and generosity as a writer. 1861 puts us in the young nation that was about to shed its skin and begin life as something new.”
—Richard Ben Cramer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“No one could capture Whitman’s ‘hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year’ more vividly than Adam Goodheart has done in this magnificent book. 1861 isn’t merely a work of history; it’s a time-travel device that makes a century and a half fall away and sets us down, eyes and ears wide open, right in the midst of the chaos and the glory.”
—Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

“With boundless verve, Adam Goodheart has sketched an uncommonly rich tableau of America on the cusp of the Civil War. The research is impeccable, the cast of little-known characters we are introduced to is thoroughly fascinating, the book is utterly thought-provoking, and the story is luminescent. What a triumph.”
—Jay Winik, author of New York Times best-sellers April 1865 and The Great Upheaval

“Adam Goodheart is a Monet with a pen instead of a paintbrush. Like an impressionist painting, 1861 reveals layers of meaning and beauty as one studies it closely.”
—James McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom

“A penetrating look at the crowded moment when the antebellum world began to turn.... Goodheart’s sure grasp never falters. Beautifully written and thoroughly original—quite unlike any other Civil War book out there.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

“An active narrative with much stylistic vibrancy.... Goodheart’s intelligent, literate book captures the emotions and enthusiasms that imbued the start of the Civil War.”
—Gilbert Taylor, Booklist

“[With] sophisticated use of a broad spectrum of sources...[Goodheart] reframes the war....shift[ing] focus away from the power centers of Washington and Charleston to look at the actions and reactions of citizens.... An evocative reinterpretation of the Civil War’s beginnings.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“Marvelous”
—David Plotz, Slate

“Engrossing.... [Goodheart’s] coherent and masterfully written narrative....draws connections that might otherwise be missed.... Tension is palpable on every page.... Goodheart is the master of the poignant vignette....Using small incidents Goodheart explores the larger historical context surrounding his figures, and in so doing seamlessly incorporates political, social, economic, cultural, and intellectual history into his narrative.... Greatest contribution lies in his ability to recreate the texture, the sharp detail, of the everyday life and experience of nineteenth-century Americans.... [1861] is an impressive accomplishment, a delightful read, and a valuable contribution that will entertain and challenge popular and professional audiences alike.”
—Michael T. Bernath, Harvard Magazine.

“Goodheart’s book stands out...for the author’s deft narrative style and vivid description.... [With] a fresh angle on the opening year of the conflict...Goodheart conjures a remarkable cast of individual Americans—from slaves and foot soldiers to the occupant of the Oval Office—using their stories to evoke a national watershed.”
—Chris Waddington, The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

Library Journal

08/01/2014
Goodheart delves into the origins of the Civil War with a series of fascinating character studies and deep dives into the culture of the time. Ably narrated by Jonathan Davis.

Kirkus Reviews

A penetrating look at the crowded moment when the antebellum world began to turn.

Thezeitgeistis by definition ephemeral and difficult to recapture—think, for example, of a period as recent as America before 9/11—but that's the neat trick splendidly accomplished here by journalist and historian Goodheart, now director of Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. History, he reminds us, is composed not merely of the momentous judgments of government ministers and generals, but also of the countless decisions of ordinary people. These responses to unexpected challenges are complicated, not always predictable and, taken together, have the power to shift events decisively. Such a time was 1861, when the "Old Gentlemen" (the likes of Buchanan, Tyler and Crittenden) gave way to the self-made men (exemplified by Lincoln, multiplied by a still younger generation of strivers like James Garfield and Elmer Ellsworth); when the Republican marching clubs, the Wide Awakes, and the exotic Zouave drill team became something more than quasi-military; when the transcontinental telegraph replaced the Pony Express; when trolley-car executive William Sherman and shop clerk Ulysses Grant looked on as two unsavory men preserved Missouri for the Union; when fugitive slaves suddenly became "contrabands"; when a general in San Francisco and a major at Fort Sumter, notwithstanding their Southern sympathies, remained faithful to their military oath; when surging patriotism and romantic notions of war turned to hatred and bloodlust; when an unfolding national crisis required people to choose sides, sweep away old assumptions and rattle categories long deemed unshakeable, and bring forth something new. Whether limning the likes of Benjamin "Spoons" Butler, abolitionist Abby Kelley Foster or the young Abner Doubleday, explaining something as seemingly inconsequential as the fashion for men's beards or unpacking Lincoln's profound understanding of the nature and unacceptable consequences of the rebellion, Goodheart's sure grasp never falters.

Beautifully written and thoroughly original—quite unlike any other Civil War book out there.

Related Subjects

Meet the Author

Adam Goodheart is a historian, journalist, and travel writer. His articles have appeared in National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and TheNew York Times Magazine, among others, and he is a regular columnist for The New York Times’s acclaimed Civil War blog, Disunion. He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.

Read an Excerpt

Lower Manhattan, April 1861
It was a day unlike any the city had known before. Half a million people, or so the newspapers would report, crowded the streets between Battery Park and Fourteenth Street. If you were there among them that day, the thing that you would never forget— not even if you lived to see the next century— was the flags. The Stars and Stripes flew above the doors of department stores and town houses, from Bowery taverns and from the spire of Trinity Church, while Broadway, the New York Herald reported, “was almost hidden in a cloud of flaggery.” P. T. Barnum, not to be outdone, especially when he sensed an opportunity for attention, had strung an entire panoply of oversize banners across the thoroughfare. The national ensign even fl uttered, in miniature, on the heads of the horses straining to pull overloaded omnibuses through the throngs on Fifth Avenue. The one flag that everyone wanted to see— needed to see— was in Union Square itself, the unattainable point toward which all the shoving and sweating and jostling bodies strove. No fewer than five separate speakers’ platforms had been hastily erected there, and every so often, above the ceaseless din, you could catch a phrase or two: “that handful of loyal men . . . their gallant commander . . . the honor of their country . . .”

If you managed somehow to clamber up onto the base of a beleaguered lamppost and emerge for a moment above the hats and bonnets of the multitude, you might glimpse what was propped up on the monument in the center of the square: cradled in General Washington’s bronze arms, a torn and soot- stained flag on a splintered staff. (One hundred forty years later, in an eerie echo of that long- forgotten day, a later generation would gather around the same statue with candles and flowers in the aftermath of another attack on the nation.) Nearby, waving a bit stiffly to acknowledge the cheers, was a lean, gray-haired officer.1 But then you lost your tenuous foothold, the gray- haired officer and his flag vanished from sight, and you were down off the lamppost again, buffeted this way and that by the odorous masses of New Yorkers, ripened by exertion and by the sunny spring day: Wall Street bankers in black broadcloth; pale, flushed shopgirls; grimy men from the Fulton docks, more pungent than anyone else, smelling of fish. It was hard to imagine anybody swaggering through such a crowd, but here came someone doing just that— and not just one man but three abreast, nonchalant young toughs all dressed in identical, baggy red shirts. One had a fat plug of tobacco in his cheek and looked ready to spit where he pleased; another fellow none too surreptitiously pinched the prettiest of the shopgirls as he passed. Somehow, by common consent, the pressing throngs parted to let them through. They all knew exactly who these superior beings were: the fire b’hoys. And as of today, no longer simply that, either— for these b’hoys had signed their enlistment papers yesterday, and were very shortly to be sworn in as soldiers of the First New York Fire Zouaves.

On the way home after the great Union rally, you might have seen many more of them, over a thousand red- shirted recruits, crowding a park just off Fourteenth Street, arrayed in rough military formation. Uncharacteristically quiet, even subdued, they raised their brawny right arms as their colonel, the man they had just unanimously elected to lead them into war—for such was the custom still, in those early months of 1861—administered the oath.

The young colonel—he seemed, from a distance, barely more than a boy—was, unlike all his thousand-odd comrades, not a New York City fireman. He was not even a New Yorker, unless one counted his childhood far upstate. He was different in almost every way from the strapping men of his regiment, with their loose limbs and salty tongues: a small man, neat and self- contained, who never drank, or smoked, or swore. He thrilled to poetry as much as to the tattoo of drums; he had dined at the White House more often than in taverns or mess halls; and he had come not from the teeming wards of Brooklyn but from the West.

He was also one of those occasional American figures whose death, even more than his life, seemed to mark the passing away of one era and the beginning of another. He would be, briefly, the war’s most famous man. And for that moment, the entire conflict, the irreconcilable forces that set state against state and brother against brother, would seem distilled into—as one who knew him well would write—“the dark mystery of how Ellsworth died.”

Like so m any Americans of his generation, Elmer Ellsworth seemed to emerge out of nowhere. This wasn’t quite true, but almost. In later years, some would swear they had roomed with him in a cheap boardinghouse in Washington, long before he was famous; or been his classmate at a high school in Kenosha before he suddenly dropped out and disappeared; or known him living up among the Ottawa Indians near Muskegon, where the tribe had adopted him as its chief. But no one was ever quite sure.

Odd remnants of his diaries would eventually turn up. And his parents, at least, who would long outlive him, eventually shared everything they could recall of his boyhood. He had left home early, though. There were few enough opportunities for him there.

Ellsworth was born in the year of the country’s first great financial depression, 1837, in the small village of Malta in Saratoga County, New York. His ancestors had settled nearby before the Revolution, but the family was poor. Ephraim Ellsworth, the boy’s father, had struggled as a tailor until the Panic ruined him, forcing him to eke out a living doing odd jobs, netting wild passenger pigeons to sell for their meat, and peddling kegs of pickled oysters door- to- door on commission. His son, serious- minded and small for his age, was sent off at the age of nine to work for a man who owned a general store and saloon. Scrupulously, the boy refused to handle liquor or even—as his master expected—to rinse out the customers’ whiskey glasses. In a world where drunkenness was common (among children, too), he had already resolved to be different.

His early life, Ellsworth would write as an adult, seemed to him nothing but “a jumble of strange incidents.” He was a child who seemed to live half in the gritty reality of his physical surroundings, half in a dream world of his own creation. Sometimes he cadged paint from a wagon shop in the village and daubed scenes onto a scrap of board or an old window shade. One of these has survived; it shows a forest- fringed river that might have been the nearby Hudson but for the turrets and spires of Arthurian castles rising along its banks. In summer, he wandered among the “green old hills” above the actual river, and in winter, he skated on the Champlain Canal, perhaps developing there the ease of movement that would later mature into a kind of balletic grace. His schooling must have been intermittent, and when he did attend, he was often teased; the other children nicknamed him “Oyster Keg,” on account of both his size and his father’s ignominious occupation. The boy learned to defend his honor with his fists.

Occasionally, though, the larger world offered glimpses of a reality nearly as glamorous as his painted fantasies. Malta lay astride the road to Saratoga Springs, a watering place popular with the officers and cadets of West Point, and in summer, the sprucely uniformed soldiers (with fine young women at their sides) must have passed through the village in hired carriages on their way to the nearby resort. For the watchful boy, the sight must have seemed a visitation from an imagined country. Many years later, Ellsworth’s aunt would recall him making forts out of loose bricks and shaping mud into breastworks; wooden blocks represented American soldiers and enemy redcoats.

His grandfather, George Ellsworth, had been a teenage militiaman in the Revolution, and although George’s pension application from the 1830s reveals that he was illiterate—he signed the document with a quavering X— it also shows that in old age he could still recount vivid tales of battling Tories and Indians along the Hudson Valley.6 Elmer’s grandfather died when the boy was not yet three, but the old veteran’s widow survived him by many years, and probably shared the stories she knew. The rocky slopes and tidy Dutch towns above the Hudson seemed themselves to tell tales of the many famous deeds they had witnessed. A boy with Ellsworth’s active imagination, looking out over the placid landscape of fields and pastures, must sometimes have felt as if the cannons were still booming and the tomahawks still flying in the forests, somewhere over the next line of hills.

When the boy was about eleven, his family moved to Mechanicville, a larger town with its own railroad station. Peddling the New York papers through the aisles of the crowded passenger cars, he must have scanned reports of the Mexican War and its aftermath, and of the liberal, nationalist revolutions in Europe, some of them sparked by student agitators not much older than he.

Perhaps because of these colorful stories in the penny papers, or perhaps from his boyhood sightings of West Point cadets, Ellsworth’s dreams had early on taken a military cast. He organized the local boys into a militia company and somewhat grandiosely dubbed it the Black-Plumed Riflemen of Stillwater, the name stolen from a pulp novel he’d read about the Revolutionary War.

Soon he was absent from home with increasing frequency, until finally, latching onto a prosperous- looking elderly gentleman who’d taken an interest in him one day on the train, he followed the stranger off to New York City to work in his linen shop. This is where the biographical record suddenly stops.

But we do know that he turned up eventually—as perhaps he was bound to—in Chicago. That town was in its restless adolescence in the 1850s, a half- wild place where patches of prairie still showed like blank canvas among the two- and three- story office buildings, and the occasional wolf still strayed in from the forested shores along Lake Michigan, to prowl the muddy streets and plank sidewalks.

Restless, too, were the young men who roamed lean and hungry along those avenues of flimsy buildings. From villages in Ohio and western Pennsylvania, from New York and the stony farms of New England, from Germany and Ireland and Sweden, they crowded into the rising metropolis of the great West. Some found work in the sawmills that ran incessantly, gnawing virgin timber into clapboard and railroad ties; others amid the stench of the stockyards. Sometimes the tideless river ran viscous with the blood of slaughtered beasts.

A year or two before the outbreak of the war, Elmer Ellsworth was one of these thousands of young men, clerking and copying papers in a law office for meager pay, living on dry biscuits and water, sleeping on the bare wooden floor. It was a life so spartan that when he could get a pound or two of salted crackers to vary his diet, the occasion was worthy of note in his diary: “Am living like a King.” It was a statement of characteristic, wildly unrealistic, optimism. Through all the years of roving, wherever they had taken him, he had never lost his boyhood dreams of glory. In his free time, Ellsworth pored over volumes on military tactics and drill formations until he knew some of them by heart. Not long after his arrival in Chicago, he also joined a local militia, the Cadets of the National Guard, one of many such groups that drew in young men far from home and family, worn thin from hard work and striving, looking for anything solid to which they could fasten themselves.

Today, in an era of full-time, highly professionalized national armed forces, it is hard to appreciate the vastly different culture of the nineteenth century, when for most Americans, volunteering for military service was more like joining a weekend bowling league than enlisting in the army as we know it. The colonial militia companies, which had provided the rank and file during the Revolution, had faded away in the succeeding decades, especially after the War of 1812 had proven them no match for the British army’s hardened veterans of the Napoleonic campaigns. But the Founding Fathers’ old vision of a United States without standing armies, in which citizen- soldiers were the first line of defense, still beckoned. In both cities and towns, men formed military companies that stood ready— at least in theory— to answer their country’s call in case of emergency. In practice, most of these units were scarcely trained and haphazardly equipped; some marched with sticks or cornstalks instead of muskets. Members paraded on the village green every Fourth of July, unfurling tattered banners that had been stitched by local maidens who were now wrinkled grandmothers. The last serious mobilization had been the one back in 1812. Each month or two throughout the year, the boys gathered for “drills” that were often simply excuses to get away from home and do some hard drinking. Larger towns and cities had rival companies: one militia for the Democrats and another for the Whigs; one for the Methodists and another for the Presbyterians; one for the Irishmen and another for the Germans. New York City even had several all-Jewish units.

In the 1850s, however, Americans started becoming a bit more serious about their militias, marching in drills and parades with fresh ardor, and even making sporadic attempts at professionalism. The Mexican War, the nation’s most dramatic military victory since the Revolution, had just been fought and won. From Europe came reports of the glorious charges and sieges of the Crimean War, and of the nationalist struggles for independence. And closer to home, some Americans were sensing the approach of civil war and beginning to sharpen their swords—in both the North and the South.

Elmer Ellsworth does not appear to have been one of these. None of his surviving writings suggests much thought about slavery and abolitionism, about the bloody struggles in Kansas or the wild- eyed prophecies of John Brown. He seems, rather, to have approached military drills with the enthusiasm and relentless discipline of an athlete pushing himself toward the big leagues.

And, like a basketball genius from the mean streets of the Bronx, or a home- run hitter sprouting amid the cornfields of Iowa, the oyster peddler’s son from upstate New York turned out to be a natural. Quite soon— by the time he was nineteen, if not earlier— the Cadets had elected him their major. What was more, he quickly found himself in demand to serve as drillmaster for regiments throughout Chicago’s environs. A photograph probably dating to around this time shows him in the resplendent but queerly antiquated garb of a militia officer, a remnant of the previous century: plumed cocked hat, tight breeches, and swallowtail coat with white facings.

It is easy to picture this confident young man putting the even younger privates through their paces, lifting his sword to bark the commands: Attention! Squad forward! Double quick—march! More difficult is imagining the splendid major returning each night to his hard lodgings and meager supper. Ellsworth hid his poverty from all but his closest friends; he would later tell of sitting in a restaurant with acquaintances and watching them feast on oyster stew, as he pretended that he had just dined so he could avoid buying a meal. Such reticence fed the aura of mystery around him. His Hudson Valley origins and military prowess fueled whispers that he had attended West Point and been expelled for some mysterious infraction, rumors that Ellsworth may or may not have disclaimed.

Sometime in the late 1850s, however, Ellsworth had an encounter that rivaled any romantic tale he might have dreamt up. It happened, improbably enough, in a Chicago gymnasium. There he met one Charles DeVilliers, a French fencing instructor recently arrived in the city. Back in Europe, DeVilliers had served as an officer in the Zouaves, an elite fighting force named for a band of Algerian tribesmen renowned for their ferocity in battle. The French Zouaves copied the North Africans’ uniform—fez, baggy pants, and a loose jacket, “suited to rapid movement and fierce daring”—and developed a reputation both for their dashing appearance and for their fearsome use of the bayonet. Newspapers and illustrated magazines worldwide, America included, covered the Zouaves’ exploits in the Crimea (where DeVilliers had served) and in Italy’s war of unifi cation. How a French Zouave ended up in Chicago is still a mystery, except that all sorts of people ended up in Chicago in those days. In any event, it is no surprise that the young militiaman gravitated toward the older officer and insisted on learning the Zouaves’ distinctive tactics. Somehow, over the course of just months— in a miraculous transformation that Hollywood, had it existed yet, might have invented—the threadbare clerk became an expert fencer, gymnast, and drill instructor.

Before long, he was teaching those skills to others. The cadets’ regiment was a militia unit “of the old school,” one member recalled many years later, composed of young men who drilled in old- fashioned uniforms and bearskin hats, “ponderous, slow, and heavy.” It was also on the verge of bankruptcy; membership had been dwindling, perhaps due to competition from newer and more glamorous organizations. Ellsworth saw an opportunity. When he showed the militiamen the Zouave moves he had learned from DeVilliers, they were fascinated. Within a month or two, he was drilling them six nights a week, for hours at a time, and the unit had renamed itself the U.S. Zouave Cadets.

The cadets’ devotion to their new commandant was all the more remarkable in light of the strictures he imposed. The new company, he told them, was to be not merely a military organization but “a source of improvement morally as well as physically.” No member was allowed to enter any drinking saloon, gambling hall, or “house of ill- fame,” on pain of immediate expulsion. Even playing billiards was off- limits, on the grounds that it might “naturally lead to drinking.” The preamble to these rules explained that while many militia groups existed “with no higher object than the mere pursuit of pleasure,” this one would be different. And remarkably, the more rigid Ellsworth’s strictures became, the more the men seemed to thrive under them. “The clerk from behind the counter, the law student from the books, the young man of leisure from his loiterings around town— all have lived under strict military discipline, self- imposed,” wrote one impressed visitor to the regimental armory.

And so it was that on July Fourth of the following year, Chicagoans lined the shore of Lake Michigan to observe a wholly unanticipated spectacle. Some forty cadets in the traditional blue- and- buff uniforms of the eighteenth- century militias—Algerian Zouave–style attire had been ordered but didn’t arrive in time—gave a performance that was more like a gymnastics event (or a nineteenth-century version of Cirque du Soleil) than any military drill the onlookers had ever seen. Instead of forming neat lines, shouldering their guns, and marching straight ahead, these militiamen leapt and rolled and yelled, loaded muskets while lying on their backs, jumped up to fire them and then fell again, thrust and twirled their bayonets like drum majors’ batons—all with a beautiful and precise synchrony. “The cadets are not large in stature, but athletes in agility and strength, moving at the word of command with the quickness and precision of steam men,” one newspaper editor marveled.

On the day before the Zouaves’ first performance, on the far side of the Appalachians— and unknown but to a few others— John Brown arrived, incognito, at Harper’s Ferry. His deeds in the months to come would electrify the country and the world. But so, too, would the sensation born that Independence Day beside Lake Michigan and soon to be sweeping beyond Chicago, across the Midwestern prairies and then past them, throughout an unquiet land.

Your Rating:

Your Recommendations:

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Our reader reviews allow you to share your comments on titles you liked,
or didn't, with others. By submitting an online review, you are representing to
Barnes & Noble.com that all information contained in your review is original
and accurate in all respects, and that the submission of such content by you
and the posting of such content by Barnes & Noble.com does not and will not
violate the rights of any third party. Please follow the rules below to help
ensure that your review can be posted.

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

We highly value and respect everyone's opinion concerning the titles we offer.
However, we cannot allow persons under the age of 13 to have accounts at BN.com or
to post customer reviews. Please see our Terms of Use for more details.

What to exclude from your review:

Please do not write about reviews, commentary, or information posted on the product page. If you see any errors in the
information on the product page, please send us an email.

Reminder:

- By submitting a review, you grant to Barnes & Noble.com and its
sublicensees the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use the
review in accordance with the Barnes & Noble.com Terms of Use.

- Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right not to post any review -- particularly
those that do not follow the terms and conditions of these Rules. Barnes & Noble.com
also reserves the right to remove any review at any time without notice.

A "different" kind of Civil War histroy, and an outstanding read

Not to be missed, and not your typical Civil War volume. Rather than focusing on detailed description of the early 1861 battles (although the surrender of Fort Sumter is given extensive coverage), this book is at its best when describing little known events and characters, and always in sparkling, descriptive prose. For example, a section on Elmer Ellsworth (one of the first conspicuous casualties of the war) and his fighting "Zouaves" is absolutely riveting and very entertaining.

I predict glowing critical reviews of this one, and indeed, Kirkus Reviews has already given it a starred rave. Highly recommended for Civil War fans and lovers of great writing.

21 out of 21 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Brainylainy

Posted April 14, 2011

A Whole New 1861

As a Civil War buff, I thought I knew all about 1861. I did not. This is an engagingly written, beautifully researched gripping account that takes you from December 20, 1860, the day South Carolina seceded, to the end of the fateful year that followed.

10 out of 10 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted April 22, 2011

a must read for civil war buffs

Fascinating book, lots of stories I never knew. Written with humor and intelligence--really hard to put down.

5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

bjgard

Posted April 18, 2011

Genealogy Research Gold

While this book hasn't named my ancestors, it provides the background on the political climate of the times. One of the best books to tell of the times. It has given my research new energy and direction.

4 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted March 17, 2012

This book should be named "1861 in New York"

I was very disappointed after reading this book. It the type of book that after the 100th page it gets very "One sided" The book is all about what went on in the Northern States, and nothing else. Not what i had hoped to read :( In short a very disappointing read. :(

3 out of 6 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

catwak

Posted June 10, 2011

I would even read it again!

Ignorance of a subject has never stopped me from expressing an opinion in the past, but here I speak with some (self-proclaimed) authority, having earned 2 degrees in American history many years ago and having slogged through much of the material I'm sure Mr. Goodheart had to endure in order to write this wonderful book. His narrative makes the complexity of time and place come alive with graceful, entertaining, engaging prose. One of the dirty little secrets about much 19th century source material is that it is ponderously written and often boring, despite the drama of thesubject matter. *1861* is anything but. Nor can today's historical purists gripe that *1861* is merely a popularized rehash; the reliance on original source material is prodigious and meticulous. If I could fault *1861* for any one thing, it would be that the narrative reads like it was written by someone with a mild case of ADD. By that I mean that instead of a linear tale, the story jumps around in place and time, so that it really helps to have a NOOK link to Google and Wikipedia, even though the actual time period covered barely gets you past First Manassas! Adam Goodheart is truly gifted. I hope that *1861* is just the first of many.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted November 24, 2011

Civil War fan?

If you are then get this book. A nice fresh perspective on this time period.

2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

lucas21181

Posted November 23, 2011

I Also Recommend:

A MUST READ.....BUY IT!!

I had a great feeling about this book. And my gut was PERFECT! I really hope Adam Goodheart writes "1862"

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

msmoonlite

Posted September 6, 2011

A good read if you like drama and detail

I'm a Civil War aficionado (but not typically a non fiction reader), so when I heard about this book, I was REALLY excited. It did not disappoint!!

The attention to detail is superb, and there are many things in the book that I was completely unaware of (like how beards were considered to be for the less fortunate until there was a movement towards "manliness").

The author did a really good job of making you feel like you were living through the moments as they happened. I really like this book. I can't wait for 1862.

2 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

revgirl

Posted August 9, 2011

EXCELLENT!

What a treat! First book I've read on the Civil War & I wasn't disappointed!

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

The graphic tale of an extraordinary year

In 1861: The Civil War Awakening author Adam Goodheart tells the story of this extraordinary year in America. This is not just a history of the start of the Civil War, it's more of a collection of gripping biographies of remarkable, yet little-known Americans at the start of the second American Revolution.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted June 1, 2011

A must read for Civil War buffs

This book is one of the most entertaining and enlightening books on the Civil War I have ever read. This is not a military history but rather a social history of a society dramatically coming to terms with issues it has avoided for decades. The author brings things into focus that students of the war will recognize, but not in the manner presented here. This is the first book that showed me why people would view John Brown as anything but a religious zealot. Adam Goodheart writes with the entertaining style, and historical detail that reminds me of Barbara Tuchman and Ted White. This book will be on everyone's year end top ten

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

2915114

Posted May 8, 2011

Great Book

Should be required reading in any study of American History. Well done.

2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

civilwar-buff

Posted April 26, 2011

A civil war book with a difference!

I have always been mystified about why this great country almost tore itself apart during the civil war. Much of the existing material is about the actual war and the skirmishes or tend to focus on Abraham Lincoln. Nothing wrong with that, however, there was always something missing. Adam Goodheart brings in the human angle and you almost feel like you are reliving the days leading upto the civil war.

2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Jtdraig

Posted February 8, 2013

Exceptional Historic Analysis

This is one of the better history books I have read on the events that led to the US Civil War. I was fascinated with the detail. I do recommend this book to any serious student of US history in that era.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted January 4, 2013

Not exactly what I expected...This book was good but I feel like

Not exactly what I expected...This book was good but I feel like it was filled with a lot of unnecessary information, which honestly bored me. It's not so much a chronicle of the early parts of the war as it is a chronicle of different people's lives in the 1860s. Some chapter were exceptional; some were long and irrelevant, in my opinion.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted October 7, 2012

If you thought you knew all there was to know...

Highly readable; as much a cultural history as a political one. Our book group was amazed at the information we'd never learned in HS/College history class.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

jccMA

Posted June 30, 2012

Highly Recommended

a great book...one of the best in recent memory

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Bentley74

Posted March 19, 2012

Highly Recommended

Extremely well written and a cogent presentation of differing perspectives of opinions and allegiances that evolved in the year prior to the onset of war, this book brings out many , hitherto little or unknown facts about the opinions and the causes that broke down any chances of peaceful resolution of the slavery question. The role of German immigrants is only of the elements that are often omitted in most histories of that era.
Indeed the whole course of the war turned"on a dime" with several key incidents described well in this easily read and hard to put down book. "1861" seemed an appropriate bookend to another great read, "April 1865" in that they both give fresh perpectives, little known facts, and some great portrayals of the great leaders of that era.
The focus of this work is mostly from the pro-Union side, but nevertheless appeared reasonably objective even to this "unreconstructed" Southern historian and civil war "buff".

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

EKellyTaylor

Posted February 10, 2012

Enlightening!

A prize read for this Southerner ... An extraordinary account of why the Civil War started ... Especially enlightening for those who grew up being told the Civil War was not primarily about slavery ... Words that now appear slanted at best and more likely just wrong ... It makes me proud to be an American ...

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.